Movable Ink, a New York City-based company whose technology lets clients create more relevant email marketing campaigns, has taken on $11 million in a fresh round of funding.
The funding, which serves as Movable Ink’s Series B, was led by Intel Capital with the participation of previous investors Contour Venture Partners, Metamorphic Ventures, ff Venture Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. This round was significantly more sizable than the $1.3 million Series A it launched with back in 2011, bringing Movable Ink’s total VC investment to $12.3 million.
Movable Ink’s CEO Vivek Sharma said in an interview this week that the company now has 119 brands including American Eagle Outfitters, Barclays, Verizon, RadioShack and others using its technology to power targeted email marketing campaigns. Movable Ink’s platform purportedly lets companies run campaigns with more up-to-the-minute, relevant, and personalized information than typical email newsletter services.
“Most email campaigns are run on a cycle of two to three months from conception to production. It’s very different from social companies like Facebook, which are pushing live code every day,” Sharma said. Movable Ink says its platform brings that same kind of speedy “agile development” process that many web developers enjoy to email marketers.
The company has grown to a full-time staff of 24 and expects to end the year with 55 or 60 employees, he said. Up until this new funding round, Movable Ink’s growth has been funded by revenue, which has grown from a paltry $200 the month of its launch in October 2011, to six figures in Q1 2012, and accelerated 100 percent in each quarter since then.
So why take on outside money when organic growth is plugging along so well? Sharma says that the new funding will be used to help scale up international operations — the company just hired former Experian executive Matthew Potter to head up growth in the UK and EMEA regions — and grow Movable Ink’s partner network with more traditional email service providers.
“It’s a new market, so one of the challenges is that we have had to convince the world why they need live content in their email,” Sharma says. “We couldn’t just be a small business service.” Now, Movable Ink has the kind of funding it needs to go big.